


Wake Me Up Inside

by Triss_Hawkeye



Category: Reverie (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Universe, Case Fic, Dark Fantasy, Friendship, Gen, Humour, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 13:40:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17044778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triss_Hawkeye/pseuds/Triss_Hawkeye
Summary: An unusual case throws Mara into fantastical peril. Paul finds himself drawing upon a long-forgotten hobby in order to help out.





	Wake Me Up Inside

**Author's Note:**

  * For [water_bby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/water_bby/gifts).



> RIP Reverie. I think its cancellation was a great shame—it was a show with a great deal of potential, and just getting into its stride over the first season. The concept has so much potential for shenanigans and the show didn’t get the chance to have nearly as much fun with the idea as it should have done. You can have a stupid amount of fun with stomping around in people’s dreams and imaginations. This is, I hope, that stupid amount of fun.

“How old is she?” Mara’s voice was low and troubled. In the hospital bed lay a girl, deep in Reverie, her face pale and breathing horribly shallow.

“Fourteen,” Paul replied, feeling ill. “The age limit is supposed to be sixteen. I suppose her parents had some sort of hand in it. I guess that’s why they tried to hide her condition so long. Convinced themselves she’d come out of it herself, and only called for help when it looked like she was in danger.” He tried to keep the judgement out of his voice. He wasn’t sure that he was entirely successful. Mara shot him a wry, sympathetic look. 

“I’m going in. I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Yeah, okay.” Paul glanced down at his tablet. “Far as I know, she didn’t have a custom-made environment—just a bunch of the fantasy pre-sets put together.”

Mara tilted her head, a surprised smile creeping onto her face. “Fantasy? Like magic and wizards and stuff?”

Paul answered her with a smile of his own. “Yeah. My idea, actually, it’s something I always wanted Reverie to have as an option. We released it in the first update. I suppose… I suppose Jessica here got sucked in.” His brief flash of joy at his favourite project faded a little with the reality at stake. “It’s like—well. Why don’t you take a look, and let me know what you think?”

Mara raised her eyebrows. “Sure.”

They parted ways at the door to Mara’s office. Paul returned to his workstation and brought up the template to Jessica’s Reverie. A fairytale-like castle, all towers and spires, surrounded by a gothic city of dense and winding streets, all right on the edge of a vast ravine. He was familiar with the underlying building blocks, but he wondered what shapes and colours overlaid the bare form of the environment. He’d spent perhaps half an hour considering it, trying to guess at what world it was supposed to be replicating while tinkering with his current work, when Mara Kint burst back into his office, panting and grinning a little wildly.

“Paul!” she said, incredulous. “You never told me about the vampire elves!”

Paul gave a wild grin right back at her. “ _What?!_ ”

\---

`Scarlett stood on the balcony at midnight and looked over the ravine. Its depths were black like the depression in her heart. A breeze flowed through her hair which was red like her eyes which was why she was called Scarlett. She didn’t think she was very pretty and she was glad about this because she didn’t want to stand out. But secretly everyone loved her. Just then, she thought she heard a voice behind her. She spun around but it was just the wind. Of course no one was there. She sighed sorrowfully. She was alone and the mission was all up to her.`

\---

“So, it works like this,” Paul began, tilting his screen to show Mara better.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, pointing at the image. “I was there! The library, it opened out into this castle. It had these amazing glowing walls, all deep pinks and purples. I went out to this balcony here overlooking the ravine—that’s where I found Jessica.” 

“Glowing walls, huh…” Paul mused. “See, like any other Reverie, we create the bare bones of the environment but it’s the client that provides their own imagery through the app, and the brain fills in the rest. What we make is generic enough to avoid any copyright issues, but what it turns into is entirely up to the client. People might use it to spend time in Middle-Earth, or the world of Warcraft, or whatever their favourite story is. It’s rather popular,” he added, perhaps a little smugly, but he was genuinely proud of it. “Just the thing, when you need to escape reality for a bit.”

Mara chewed on a fingernail. “So there’s the option to populate the world with elves—but it’s Jessica who turned them into sort of… gothy elves with fangs, then?”

“I suppose so. What else do you remember? Maybe if we know what world she’s going to, it’ll give us some idea of what she’s escaping from. And how we can help.”

“That’s just it.” Mara turned and sat against the side of the desk. “I think it _is_ key, somehow. She seemed frustrated at things not going right. It was like she was trying to play out a specific story, but something’s missing. When I found her, she asked me what I was doing there, then whether I was someone called ‘Raven’.”

Paul frowned, something unsettling occurring to him. “This castle—it wasn’t Hogwarts, was it?”

Mara shook her head. “Noooo… is that important?”

Paul waved that away with a slight sense of relief. “No, nothing, forget I asked. Please continue.” 

“Well, I guess I should’ve given her a straight answer first. But I asked if she was expecting a Raven. At that point she yelled at me to leave and ran off into the castle. I lost her soon afterwards.” She gave a regretful grimace. “Still, I just couldn’t stop noticing it after that, while I was trying to track her down. Raven was _everywhere_. There were these missing-person posters up, the people I passed—the vampire elves, I mean—were whispering to each other about it, it was scratched into the walls… like whoever Raven was, they were supposed to be there. But weren’t.”

“Hmm…” Paul leaned back in his chair and thought. “What else do you remember?”

Mara looked at the ceiling and bit her lip, clearly dredging up her memory of the place. Paul found himself desperately wanting to see what she was seeing, behind her eyes. 

“There wasn’t anything I recognised, but I’m not really a fantasy nut. Um… it was an old-style castle, towers and parapets, that sort of thing. Really dark stone with these vivid lights glowing inside the walls, somehow.” She moved her hands as she described, intense and focussed, like she was summoning an image into existence. “Lots of elves with long black leather coats and bright-coloured hair, ear piercings and tattoos, big boots. Think, I don’t know, some kind of goth club night. Uh, people had crossbows, lots of crossbows and daggers. The place, I overheard someone call it something, something like… Arinalia? Oh—and Jessica told me not to call her that too, that her name was—what was it—Scarlett! Red hair and eyes and, uh, fangs as well. Maybe she’s playing a particular character?”

Paul rubbed his chin. “Well, some of those ring a bell, but not at all the same bell. I can’t say I’ve heard of Arinalia before. Maybe it’s a video game…”

“Rings bells, huh? Are _you_ a fantasy nut?” Mara asked, leaning forwards, a slightly teasing smile on her face.

“Hah. Well, a little, I suppose.” Paul’s mind went back to the old house he’d shown her before, the living room lined with bookshelves. Curling up in a corner, hunched against the wall, quiet and unnoticeable. Escaping into a different world. “I read a lot as a kid,” he said out loud.

Mara nodded and a thoughtful silence descended between them for a moment. “Well, I guess I’ll go do some research then,” she said.

“Me too—I’ll let you know if anything comes to mind.”

And then she was out of his office again with a brief wave goodbye, the corners of her eyes crinkling as though she was still delighted to be doing her job, despite the worries and concerns that plagued her. Paul felt a warmth in his chest at the thought, and returned to his own work with new determination.

\---

Paul spent another hour or two tweaking some diagnostic tools, but his curiosity got the better of him. A little browsing the internet gave him several possibilities as to what Jessica’s world could be, but nothing rang particularly true, and nowhere could he find anything by the name of Arinalia. Mara’s description had seemed like some sort of amalgamation of disparate parts, and the building blocks of Jessica’s Reverie reflected that, all pieces pulled together from various different sub-packages of the fantasy release. It was as if he was missing some fundamental piece of information that would make it all make sense.

He rolled back from his desk and retreated onto the sofa tucked in the side of his office. Everyone had their own preferred Reverie spaces—many just used the long, tilted-back chairs supplied to each office and scattered around the building. Those senior enough for their own office had their own personalised cushioned nooks. On the other hand, it wasn’t uncommon to see some of the younger coders in the open-plan offices slumped over their desk, passed out over a tablet. He’d tried to discourage this a couple of times, but it seemed that becoming used to dropping into unconsciousness several times a day for testing purposes gave people a strange lack of self-consciousness about it. Since the coding offices were hardly the most public-facing, he let it slide. 

For his part, a sofa did just fine. He held the tablet in front of him and slipped into Reverie as easily as blinking. With no more than two steps and the turn of a door handle, he was back within the living room of his old family home. He stood and revolved on the spot, taking in the bookcases. At first glance, they looked immaculate, identical to what they would have appeared like in life, drawn straight from his memory. As he approached one, though, the algorithm started to make itself noticed, just a little, to the practiced eye—of course he couldn’t remember every single book on his parents’ bookshelves, so the code filled them in with likely best-guesses, that changed subtly from visit to visit based on his mood.

Paul stopped at the shelves which contained his old collection of fantasy and science fiction books. Here the covers were least in flux, the strongest in his memory, rows of Tolkien and McCaffrey, Asimov and Herbert. He loosened a worn copy of Assassin’s Quest from the shelf and let it fall open in his hands. Again, the algorithm couldn’t access the text of a book and he couldn’t remember it himself, so the text before him was meaningless—it _looked_ fine, and nothing seemed strange or out of place, just like in a dream, but trying to read just caused the BCI to persuade his mind to rebound off the concept and look for something else to do, not wanting to break the illusion of reality. The effect was almost unconscious to the average Reverie user, although Paul had developed enough of a lucidity about it to notice. If he concentrated, he could see the generated snippets of nonsensical, if somewhat thematic, writing across the pages, interspersed with the occasional quote that had stayed in his memory. The memories of wolves and rivers of magic he had imagined while reading it played in the back of his mind. 

He closed the book and made to replace it when a bundle of paper fell out of its back cover. He started in alarm, worried he’d somehow broken the book, but it wasn’t pages that had fallen out. As he bent down to pick them up, he realised that they were a sheaf of lined paper he’d smuggled home from school. Book discarded, he flicked through them, able to read every word as they bubbled up from deep within his mind, things he had barely remembered until now.

Elves with nut-brown skin and crow-black hair swooped through giant groves of spice-trees on the backs of great dragons, fighting off evil snake demons and getting lost in magical storms, all within the childish, blunt-pencil curls of his own handwriting. 

Paul laughed softly to himself, then swept from the room with a murmur of, “Exitus.” He strode over to Mara’s office with a renewed sense of purpose, relieved to find her still awake, hunched over her laptop with a puzzled expression. She looked up hopefully as he tapped on her door and stuck his head in.

“Mara, I’ve just had a thought,” he said, pleased yet inexplicably nervous. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong.”

\---

“Wait, you’re telling me you wrote stories when you were a kid?” Mara looked amazed at this revelation. 

“Well, mostly in my early years of high school,” Paul clarified, nerves still jittering in the pit of his stomach. “But that’s not the point—”

“Hey,” Mara interjected, somehow tapping in to his discomfort. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about! I think that’s amazing, doing something creative like that.”

Paul ducked his head. “Yeah, well I grew out of it.” He wasn’t sure why he suddenly felt so defensive. Like undercurrents of anxiety he’d thought long since dealt with were bubbling back up to the surface. “Anyway, my point is, we couldn’t figure out what Arinalia was from because it _doesn’t exist_ —not as a published book, or film, or game, anyway. It’s Jessica’s own world. She made it up, she was the one who wrote it. It’s not escapism—it’s creation.”

Rocking on her heels, Mara exhaled softly. “Okay. But then… if Jessica wrote the story, why does she seem so stuck? Why can’t she just finish the story herself?”

Paul thought back to faint moments of memory of his head in his hands, staring down in frustration at a blank page. “Writer’s block?” he suggested.

“Maybe. But that doesn’t explain who Raven is.”

“Actually, maybe I can explain that. Look at this.” Paul beckoned her round to his computer and brought up the results of his more enlightened search. “This is a creative writing forum. I found the name ‘Arinalia’ come up in a discussion about creating fantasy worlds.”

“Oh _nice_ , Paul. What does it say?”

“Not a great deal, to be honest. It’s just a few posts, a couple of years ago. Looks like early days, asking for help coming up with ideas. But here’s the important bit—there’s two users talking about this world they’re making. They’re working together.”

Mara snapped her fingers. “Jessica has a co-author!”

“Right!”

She broke into a wide grin. “That was just the information I needed. I know exactly who we need to speak to.”

\---

`Everyone knew the castle of Aranalia was highly magical and it was built with magic-absorbing stones that glowed pink and purple deep inside. The stones transmitted dark energy so that the vampire elves could live there without having to drink blood, but they did still drink blood sometimes when they fought their enemies. The magic made them all powerful fighters, except for Scarlett because it wouldn’t work on her, but no one noticed because she was better than everyone else at fighting which was why she was picked for the mission. She was the only one who knew the secret that she didn’t belong.`

\---

A little later, after school hours, Mara returned to Paul’s office with another teenage girl in tow. “Paul, I’d like you to meet Susie. Susie, Paul’s my colleague at Onira-Tech. Would you mind bringing him up to speed?”

The girl nodded, nervously tucking her long straightened hair behind an ear. She reminded Paul a little of the sort of crowd he used to hang out with in high school, dressed like Alexis did every now and again on her more casual days—black skinny jeans and a band t-shirt under an unzipped hoodie with deliberate rips in it. That was fashion for you.

As it turned out, Susie and Jessica were best friends—or had been, until a recent falling out which Mara had been able to track down on social media with Dylan’s help. They had been writing a story together. Apparently that was also the source of the disagreement.

“Scarlett is Jessica’s character,” Susie explained. “Raven is mine. She got to have the main character and Raven’s her mentor. But she got mad when I kept giving Raven more powers than Scarlett, even though that’s the only way that makes _sense_. Raven wouldn’t work as a mentor if she wasn’t better than Scarlett.” She folded her arms and scowled. “Also I can’t believe she made a Reverie of _our_ world without telling me!”

Paul and Mara exchanged a glance. “That’s something you’ll have to talk with Jessica about,” Mara said gently. “Working through conflict can be hard, especially if it’s something you care about a great deal, but I’m sure you’ll be able to figure it out. Before you can do that, though, we’ll have to get Jessica out of there.”

Susie looked over at Paul, eyes wide and a little uncertain. He picked up where Mara left off. “We think that she’s trying to tell her story—your story—but she didn’t include Raven. Probably deliberately, if the two of you had a falling out.”

“But her subconscious knows that Raven’s missing,” Mara added. “Part of her still wants Raven there. It’s like she can’t finish the story without that character.”

Susie scoffed. “Of course she can’t. Raven’s the one who taught Scarlett how to use her powers, who gives her the talismans she needs to do magic, who trains her to fight—without Raven she’s nothing!” Paul couldn’t quite help his eyebrows raising ever so slightly. An awkward silence fell. Susie sighed. “Okay, I need to talk to her.”

Mara stepped in. “I think there’s a way to help Jessica work through this story,” she said. “I think if I go in _as_ Raven, she’ll have what she needs to bring it to a close.”

Paul turned to Susie. “That’s why we need your help. How do you feel about helping me create a Raven outfit for Mara here?”

Susie’s eyes lit up.

\---

Back in the library, before opening the door again to Jessica’s Reverie, Mara took a moment to look down at herself. She’d glanced over at Paul and Susie sat at the computer a few times over the past half hour, while they were creating her look and she swotted up on the first couple of chapters of _Lost Wings: A Tale of Arinalia_. Susie had reluctantly sent them to her after extracting a solemn promise never to show them to anyone else. So far, Raven seemed powerful, confident and mysterious. No pressure, then. 

Mara had wondered how the other two were getting on, noticing Susie relax and become more enthused, and Paul become increasingly delighted, his grin growing wider every time he looked over to catch Mara’s eye. The reason why was now apparent. 

She knew he enjoyed sending her into Reverie in nice outfits, but he’d evidently gone all out on this one. Under a deep purple leather jacket was some sort of black lace top—she could see rose patterns around the neckline. On her legs were skin-tight black leather trousers and delightfully stompy boots with chunky heels, going almost up to her knees and covered with buckles that looked more dramatic than functional. Her hair was longer than normal and fell in loose curls, a steely silver shot through with strands of pure white. Bringing her hands up to her ears, she could feel them taper into points. 

But the most significant thing was the strange weight on her back from a pair of huge wings. It took a few moments of clumsy imagining before she figured out how to move them, stretching them out behind her then bringing them forward so that they wrapped around her shoulders and the flight feathers stretched out in front of her. Giant angel wings, except that the plumage was a rich black with streaks of purple iridescence where the light hit the feathers just right. 

“Scarlett and Raven are both angel elves,” Susie had explained. “Scarlett had hers stolen but Raven still has hers. That’s the most important part of the look.” Paul looked like he might practically explode from glee.

“You’ll feel them there—probably not like part of you, at least at first, but you’ll be able to move them, and they shouldn’t be too heavy either,” Paul had explained. “Just… you probably shouldn’t try to fly with them. That’s still…”

“Something you’re working on,” Mara finished for him. “Got it.”

Well, it was certainly a look. Mara gave the wings another experimental shake, rolled back her shoulders, took a hold of one of door handles and strode back into Jessica’s Reverie. She was back in the softly glowing walls of the castle, in some kind of long passageway. To her right was a grand set of double-doors, probably leading into some sort of hall. That seemed her best bet. She approached them and pushed them open. 

It was indeed a huge hall, lined with tables on either side filled with various sorts of people—the pale faces of fanged vampire elves, but also tanned, hulking warriors with mane-like hair, delicate forms with mottled blue-grey skin and webbed fingers, and a few disdainful individuals with horns and skin than ranged from dark red to deep salmon pink that matched the magical glow inside the black stone walls.

Everyone fell to a hush as she walked in, staring as she walked down the centre of the hall towards a dais at the end with an empty high table. She let her wings spread out a little behind her and the action filled her with confidence. Falling into a powerful stride, she felt like a movie character, the heads of every dream figment turning to her. In most Reveries this would feel like a bad sign, but Mara figured that a main character in a story—not least one that had been missing up until now—would probably warrant such attention, and she tried not to feel self-conscious. Glancing over at the walls, she could still see Raven’s name etched into them, but the missing person posters seemed to have disappeared. In their place were wanted posters instead. She couldn’t make out the face in them and they gave her a faint sense of foreboding which she tried to dismiss as she ascended the dais. 

Mara spun around, hands on her hips, wings outspread, and wearing what she hoped was a suitably mysterious smile. “I am Raven,” she declared, as authoritatively as possible, to the entire hall, who had by this point clustered around behind her. “I’m looking for Scarlett. Anyone care to help me with that?”

There was a moment of silence as she scanned the room, noticing that there were an awful lot more crossbows and nasty-looking blades than she’d expected. And a disturbing amount of claws and bared teeth. She met eyes with someone in the back of the hall and had about a second to recognise her as Scarlett, staring back in dismay and alarm. And then the horde attacked.

\---

Paul started and dashed over to Mara as she sat bolt upright, shrieking, “Exitus! Exitus!” She was panting hard, on the edge of wide-eyed panic.

“Woah, woah, Mara, you’re okay, you’re okay,” he said gently, helping her to sit forward on the sofa in his office where she’d dropped into Reverie. “What happened?”

“I got attacked,” she gasped, taking a few gulps of breath to calm herself down. “I think they got the message about who I was supposed to be. But I wasn’t really prepared for the vampire elves and their friends wanting Raven dead.”

Paul looked over to Susie in alarm. Her face paled. 

“Vampire elves?” she squeaked. “That’s not good.”

“What do you mean? What don’t we know?” Paul tried to keep his agitation out of his voice. He didn’t want to make Susie any more scared than she was already, though it was hard not to worry about Mara when she ran into complications. Over the time she’d been at Onira-Tech so far, she’d stress-tested Reverie 2.0 in ways not even Alexis had dreamt up. That and the issues with derealisation she was still working through bleeding into her experience. Still, he mentally walked himself away from the threat of anxiety brooding in the back of his mind. It wouldn’t help, it never did.

Susie bit her lip. “She’s at a part we haven’t written yet. Sorry, I thought she was beginning at the start. I should have guessed.” She bowed her head, looking overwhelmed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Paul patted Mara’s shoulder—she gave him an OK sign and nodded over to Susie. Paul got up to sit next to the teen at his desk. “Listen, Susie, it’s okay. Mara got a fright, but she’ll be fine. Reverie is not going to kill her, even if its occupants seem to want to.”

“I’ve survived far worse!” Mara called over from the sofa, her voice cheerful if a little strained.

“It’s not your fault Susie. Honestly, we shouldn’t have assumed it would be this simple,” Paul reassured her. “But it’s clear we need a better understanding of your world. Can you tell us about where Jessica is, and what she needs to do? You said it’s not written yet, but have you discussed this part with Jessica yet?”

Susie took a breath to rally herself. “Okay,” she whispered. “Well. It’s like this.”

\---

`Scarlett ran her tongue along her fake fangs. Because her angel wings were stolen and she had really pale skin she was perfect for infiltrating the vampire elves and taking out the mysterious power source that was making them stronger. But the problem was that it was at the top of the castle’s highest tower, guarded by lots of vampire elves. Also there were lots of other kinds of demon elves staying in the castle, like fish-folks and hellions. Scarlett was good but even she knew that she was outnumbered, especially without her powers.`

\---

“So Scarlett was infiltrating the demon elves,” Susie concluded. “She could do that since her wings were stolen. But Raven can’t—she has a lot of powers but she can’t disguise what she is, so she couldn’t join Scarlett. She probably would show up to help near the end, but lots of stuff has to happen first.”

Paul nodded, looking down at the page of notes he’d made in rough bullet points, with ideas and further questions scribbled into the margins. He felt a strange yet familiar sense of excitement that he couldn’t quite place. A sense of eagerly wanting to find out what happened next, combined with the sense that, whatever it was, it was up to him to help shape what happened. 

“So, let’s see if I’ve got this right,” he said. “Mara, as Raven, needs to meet Scarlett on the balcony and hand her a magical talisman that will help her to fight through the castle.”

“But there’s too many enemies still in the castle,” Mara added. “So Raven then needs to go off and cause a distraction that will draw most of them out into the town.”

“And once she’s caused the distraction,” Paul continued, “she can rejoin Scarlett inside the castle and help her to reach the power source.”

“And then Scarlett can destroy the power source and finish the story,” Mara said, “which should give her the closure she needs to wake up.”

“Well, finish this story arc, anyway,” Susie admitted. “Hopefully that’s enough.” 

Paul turned back to his computer screen and loaded the fantasy resource package. “Well, sending a talisman in with Mara should be easy enough,” he said, scrolling through various models and picking something suitably esoteric-looking. “Hopefully Jessica’s mind will latch onto it, allowing her to use the powers she’s been subconsciously denying herself because the conditions weren’t right.”

“Great!” Mara said with a smile. “If I enter by the same door as I did at first, the one that takes me right near the balcony, it should be easier for me to get into the castle unnoticed. I’ll find Scarlett _without_ attracting attention this time.”

“So, now all we need to figure out is how to make a big distraction.” Paul turned to Susie with a smile. “What are your thoughts, Susie? How does this go?”

Before Susie could answer, there was a rapid knock on Paul’s office door, and Charlie burst in.

“Mara, there you are!” Charlie’s face was drawn into an urgent frown. “Jessica’s condition has worsened. She’s barely breathing. You need to get back in there now.”

Mara looked helplessly at Paul and Susie. “But we haven’t—”

“There’s no time, Mara!” Charlie insisted. “It has to be now. I need to go tell her parents.” He left as swiftly as he arrived. 

Mara scooped up her tablet and lay back on the sofa. “I have to go. I’ll have to come up with something on the fly, I guess.”

“Mara, wait.” Paul opened up the testing tools on his computer and gave the options a skim-read. “We can send the talisman in with you now. But Susie and I can keep talking while you find Jessica. We… do have a set of tools for testing purposes that can allow us to make alterations to Reveries on the fly. I’ve never used them on a client’s Reverie before, but I think I can send attentional things in via your connection while you’re in there. Once we come up with a plan, I’ll make the required alterations for you. Just head out into the city and watch for changes.” He turned back to Mara. “Remember that it’s a virtual environment. The changes might manifest themselves in strange ways.” He broke into a grin. “You’ll have to tell me all about it when you get back!” 

The look on her face showed a little more alarm than he’d intended to convey, but Mara nonetheless nodded before leaning back. With one more statement of, “Apertus,” her body went limp and the tablet fell back onto her lap. Susie watched the process with a look of no less unease than last time. Paul gave her an encouraging smile. 

“So, let’s come up with a distraction, shall we?”

Susie looked away. Looking closer, Paul realised that she was pale and trembling.

“Susie?”

“I can’t do this!” she snapped, leaping to her feet. Her fists were clenched and tears collected in the corners of her eyes. “I always wrote with Jessica, we always talked about what we were going to write loads before we actually wrote it! I can’t just… come up with ideas! Not like this! I just… I just suck, I can’t do this.” She slumped back into her chair and buried her head in her hands with a sob. “Jessica’s going to die and it’s all my fault.”

“Hey. Hey, listen.” Paul leaned forwards and caught her eye as she looked up. “None of this is your fault. And you’re not alone. You’ve still got a co-author.”

Susie gave a slightly baffled sniff through her tears.

Paul opened his mouth, which had gone dry all of a sudden, but he forced the words out anyway. “I’ll tell you something not many people know about me. I used to write stories too, when I was in high school. I didn’t have a great home life and creating other worlds was really helpful for me. So I know what it’s like, and I know how hard it is when you’re stuck. The good news is, we can bounce ideas off each other. And what we come up with today doesn’t have to be how your story goes when it’s done. All we have to do is find something that works for this version.” 

“First draft, right?” Susie scrubbed at her eyes with a sleeve and sat up a little.

“Exactly!” Paul said, leaning back. “So, did you and Jessica have any discussions about what the distraction might be? Or do we have a blank slate to play with?”

“Well… not much,” Susie mumbled. “It was supposed to be something big.”

“Like a fire or something?”

Susie shrugged. “I dunno, maybe. But it has to get the warriors out of the castle. Something more like an attack, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Paul chewed on a nail in thought. “We could maybe send in an army. The mind populates a Reverie itself, but it is possible to insert templates for background characters. They won’t do a lot, but as long as they look like a threat, they’ll be enough to distract the rest.”

Susie threw up her arms. “But I don’t know who it would be! It can’t be the angel elves, the whole idea of this bit of the story is that they don’t know or care what’s going on yet. That wouldn’t make sense to Jessica, they’d just be ignored.”

Paul considered this for a moment and returned to his computer. Hesitantly, he opened a folder he’d been putting together for a new Reverie earlier that day. “Hey, Susie,” he said, some mixture of excitement and sudden shyness catching at his voice. “Just for now, how do you feel about a crossover?”

\---

`Scarlett stood on the balcony at midnight and looked over the ravine. Its depths were black like the depression in her heart. A breeze flowed through her hair which was red like her eyes which was why she was called Scarlett. She didn’t think she was very pretty and she was glad about this because she didn’t want to stand out. But secretly everyone loved her. Just then, she thought she heard a voice behind her. She spun around.`

`It was Raven!!`

`“I’m here to help you. Here, take this,” Raven said mysteriously from the shadows. She handed Scarlett a magical talisman.`

`“My powers are back!” Scarlett yelled, using the power in the talisman to turn it into a magical glaive.`

`“It’s time to finish this,” said Raven confidently.`

\---

“So, uh, what you did in the hall,” Jessica said, letting the Scarlett act drop a little. “That was brave. It was pretty dumb. But cool.”

Mara decided not to mention not knowing that the demon elves were enemies at this point. “I wanted you to know I was there.” She grimaced. “I hope I didn’t cause too much trouble for you, though.”

Jessica shrugged and flicked Scarlett’s red hair. “It was easy enough to convince the rest of them that Raven was after me because I’d fought her before. No one guessed we were allies.” 

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“Soooo… if you’re Raven, I guess you talked to Susie, huh.” She seemed less suspicious than resigned. “Guess I can’t escape that no matter what I do.” 

Mara saw no sense in denying it and nodded. “Yeah, I did speak to Susie. Look, I know you two fell out, but she’s worried about you. You’re not in a good state out in the real world. We need to get you out of here. But I know that you need to do this first. I’m here to help you finish the story—not to steal your thunder,” she added hastily as Jessica frowned. “Just to give you some support. I hear you need a distraction?”

Jessica’s eyebrows raised. “We never got this far in the story. I was trying to figure it out for myself, but I just can’t get it to work. What are you going to do?”

“No idea yet!” Mara said brightly. “But listen, my colleague Paul is working with Susie to come up with something.”

“Susie’s here?” Jessica whispered.

“On the outside. She’s helping to decide what comes next for Raven. And you can decide what you do next as Scarlett.” Mara smiled. “It’s like you’re still writing the story together. Are you up for it?”

Jessica glanced away for a moment, back over the ravine, then looked down at the talisman in her hand. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Okay.” She reached into her mouth and popped out the fake fangs inside it, shooting Mara a shy and more normal-toothed grin. “No need to keep pretending I’m one of them now.”

Mara nodded encouragingly. “Great. Hey, I’m going to sneak out into the city now. Watch the doors—when you see people leaving the castle, that’s your cue to go. All right?” 

“All right,” Jessica replied with firmer nod. “There’s a shortcut to the city through my Reverie library. Good luck.”

“You too.” Mara waved, and jogged back to the door that opened into the library. Once back inside the familiar wood-panelled walls, she took a breath to steel herself. Somewhere out there, Paul would have put something into the Reverie that would serve as the distraction. All she had to do was find it. Whatever it was.

She tried the only door left she hadn’t been through yet. It opened out into a narrow street, barely more than an alleyway, cobbled and slick with the residue of rain, the slightly-clouded moonlight turning the stones a dull silver. She looked behind her—the door, through which the warm lighting of the library was still spilling, was small and set into some high exterior wall. A sort of side entrance, perhaps, when not moonlighting as a mental portal. Behind the wall Mara could see the highest tower of the castle stretch into the night sky, its silhouette black against the grey-streaked stars and its dark stone harbouring a deep pink glow, just like its interior. At its top, a red light beamed out of narrow windows. Whatever it was up there, that was Scarlett’s goal.

Her own goal was somewhere down here. Letting the library door shut behind her, Mara began to walk slowly down the street. It sloped gently downhill away from the castle, winding round to one side so she couldn’t see very far down its length. Above the stone, tall and narrow wooden buildings creaked and seemed to lean in over her. Candlelight and muffled voices leaked through the occasional shuttered window, but for the most part it was dim and quiet.

If there was something here for her to notice, she hadn’t found it yet. She followed the street around its bend, noticing a small trickle of water run along its edge beside her. Hoping that it was a hint, she followed the trickle down until the street levelled out and began to slope upwards again. She paused, squinting at the ground. Something wasn’t quite right.

And then she realised.

The trickle of water wasn’t stopping or pooling at the point where the alley curved back upwards, or changing its course in the slightest. It just continued to flow along the side of the road, bending upwards as the surface did. Her breath catching, Mara followed it, faster now. She took several strides and stopped again as she realised she was still going downwards—or at least she felt like she was, not like she’d just started climbing again. She glanced behind her. The road she had been on bent upwards behind her, curving to a steepness impossible for her to have just come down. She spun around again, heart pounding. Ahead of her, the road bent downwards this time, as if she was cresting the top of a hill. She took a few more steps forward, cautious and steady. Again, she felt no change in the slope of the road as she walked forwards. Glancing up, she saw the roofs of the buildings directly above her aligned with the street, but they warped strangely the further along she looked, as if she was peering through some sort of misshapen lens. Looking back, the road she had come down had reorientated itself again, but she could see it now—a sort of wrinkle in the space it occupied, the buildings and water reshaping themselves to fit within it. 

Ahead, the road bent upwards more strongly now and widened a little. Mara continued to pace forward slowly and methodically. Immediately around her, space kept its form, the road beneath her feet still sloping downwards away from the castle, the ribbon of water still flowing. But the further she looked from herself, the more the world bent out of shape and folded back on itself. Feeling woozy at the sight, she looked back down at her feet, trying not to notice the fabric of space crumpling around her.

The street ended at another, broader road. Mara stepped onto its surface, noticing that aside from the trickle of water, which turned to follow the new road downwards, the stone—neat flagstones now, rather than cobbles—was entirely dry. She stood at the side of it, looking down to where it led in a comfortably straight manner through the town, ending in a pair of giant doors in a surrounding wall not too far away. On either side of it, side streets and their buildings wrinkled in its wake, their impossible geometry squeezing them into less space than they should have taken up. 

“Aaaah, Paul,” Mara breathed in realisation. “That’s clever.” This street had been inserted recently, after whatever rain had fallen, pushing the surrounding environment to the side, which bent and warped with nowhere else to go. Mara followed it, thankful that it was recent enough to not have filled with any people yet—just wrought-iron lamp-posts that leaked a sickly white moon-like light into their surroundings. It took her only a couple of minutes to get to the town gates. 

There were guards along the top of the wall, but none immediately above the gates yet. Mara watched them from the shadows at the side of the road. Some of the closer ones gave the new section of wall a bemused look but otherwise didn’t move towards it, as if they were struggling to acknowledge it was there. The gates were closed, and looked intimidatingly heavy. There was a small door set in the wall beside them—Mara slipped through while no guards were looking in her direction, and to her relief found the gatehouse inside to be unoccupied. She made her way across, sneaked through the door on the other side of the wall, and stepped out onto nothing.

She almost drew back with a gasp, but it wasn’t quite nothing after all. There was ground beneath her feet, but it was perfectly flat and there was nothing to see—it wasn’t even black, it just wasn’t there. It stretched off into nothing, an emptiness at the edge of the Reverie except for a block of perhaps fifty people standing in neat rows not too far away. Behind them were a few others, sat on the back of large winged creatures, perhaps some sort of dragons. Mara padded over to them cautiously, and one individual stood at the front of the block turned to greet her.

It was Paul.

Or rather, it wasn’t Paul, but he looked almost as if he could be. He was an elf, with long, straight hair that reached most of the way down his back and sharply pointed ears. His face seemed very much like Paul’s but subtly different—clean-shaven and strangely ageless. Over his torso he had some kind of intricately crafted leather armour, as did the rest of the group, a small army of elves with skin like dark polished wood. Beneath their armour they wore flowing silks in deep yellows and oranges. Even the dragons, hulking grey beasts the size of a car with wrinkled iguana-like faces, had saddles and reins ornamented with streaming ribbons in rich colours. 

Mara couldn’t stop a grin creeping onto her face as she approached. “Wow,” she said. “You guys look amazing.”

The elf who was not quite Paul inclined his head politely, if a little puzzled at her enthusiasm. “I believe we can help each other. We have come to invade the city.”

Mara’s eyes widened slightly. “Right! Yes! You’re my distraction! I…” She glanced over at the dragons. “You can’t fly over the wall?”

“We are not from this world,” the elf replied, indicating the town Mara had left, which seemed to float by itself in the space behind her, the castle towers stretching into the sky beyond it like stone fingers. “We need to be let in.”

“I guess that’s my job, huh?” she said. “Leave it to me. Once you’re in, try to keep the fighting away from the castle. We’re trying to draw them out.”

The elf nodded cordially. “We understand.”

Mara started back towards the gate, but a few paces in she turned and looked back at the elf leader. “Who… who are you?” she asked. “I just. Get the feeling I recognise you.”

“My name is Prince Vikram,” he replied with a small bow. 

“I’m Mar—Raven. I’m Raven.” 

The corners of the prince’s lips turned up in a hint of a smile. “Any friend of Paul’s is a friend of ours.”

Mara gave a soft gasp in amazement, but there was no time to ask any further questions. She jogged back to the gatehouse. Still, at the door, just before going back in, she turned around to face the new elves once more. “Hey… are you lot going to be all right?” she called over. “There’s a castle full of vampire elves and stuff in there.”

Prince Vikram threw a look back over his shoulder at the line of dragons, and turned back to her with a very Paul-like smile. “Yeah, you know, I think we’ll be okay.” 

Mara laughed and re-entered the gatehouse, feeling some slight relief at the reappearance of solid ground beneath her feet. The gates didn’t seem to have any obvious locks or handles, but within the gatehouse was a large wheel attached to some mechanism which presumably opened them. She grasped the wheel, straining to turn it. 

“Oh, come on,” she muttered to herself. “Raven should totally be able to do this.” She flung her weight against it, pulled and beat her wings for a little extra force, and was gratified to hear a loud wooden groan as the gates slowly parted. Her arms ached by the time she heard the thud of them opening to their fullest extent. 

She ran outside, massaging her shoulders, and saw the warrior elves running into the city, the dragons gliding in through the doorway over their heads. Shouts were making their way along the town wall, and someone somewhere was urgently ringing a bell. A small group of patrolling guards barrelled out of an alleyway, vicious-looking swords drawn and fangs bared, and there was the clash of metal against metal as they were met by the invaders. The noise of swords and shouts rose to an almighty clamour, but Mara didn’t stay to watch. Her work done, she swiftly retraced her steps towards the castle, occasionally ducking into doorways out of the way of groups of demon elves running towards the fray, barely paying her notice. 

Just before she reached the street she had first come down, she saw a horde of warriors pouring out of the doors around the outer castle walls. One elf nearby noticed her and sent up a shout. She swore under her breath as about ten of them diverted their course towards her. She increased her pace to get to the street before they did. Skidding onto the cobblestones, she dashed back up the slope, squeezing her eyes tight through the ripples in space. She could hear the voices of her pursuers get louder and flicked her wings again to put on one last burst of speed. Gosh, those things were useful once she’d gotten the hang of using them. 

Mara careened into the door to the library and darted inside. As she closed the door behind her, almost managing to trap a bunch of her feathers in the process, the noise from outside vanished. She leant against its wood-panelled surface, the warm, gentle lighting of the library such a contrast to the dark moonlit streets outside. She grinned helplessly as she caught her breath, adrenaline still buzzing through her system. Reverie would never cease to amaze her.

There wasn’t much time to rest. Jessica would have made a start as soon as the warning bells rang and people started pouring out of the castle. Mara left the library via the door near the balcony again. As expected, the balcony was deserted—looking out, along the edge of the ravine towards the town, Mara could see its strange rumpled state from the side, and clumps of fighting taking place where she could see down to the streets themselves. The distraction was working.

Darting back into the castle, she scouted along the halls for a way up to the top. Not far from the balcony, she found a stone staircase leading upwards. It was steep, but she climbed as quickly as she could, half alarmed and half pleased to find a body sprawled at the top of them, a sword still loosely clasped in its limp, fish-scaled hand. Mara picked it up, testing its weight before emerging onto the upper floor. This corridor was narrow, with closed doors along one side and slit-like windows along the other, but the sound of fighting was coming from the end, where another stone staircase spiralled up into the central tower itself. Mara headed straight for it, running past other fallen soldiers, and took the stairs two at a time. There was a pained wail above her, followed by a thudding noise, and she had just about enough time to press herself against the wall, wings and all, before a wolf-like figure tumbled down the stairs from above her, rebounding off the central column and yelping each time they hit stone on the way down. Mara winced as they fell out of view, then continued to climb until she almost collided with a familiar red-haired figure at the top.

Scarlett was tucked just out of sight of the doorway onto the top floor. She brought a finger to her lips and whispered down to Mara. “There’s four of them guarding the power source.” She seemed hesitant. Having fought her way up here one or two at a time, four might just be a little too many to handle by herself. 

Mara glanced down at the sword in her own hand, and then at the talisman still clutched in Scarlett’s. “We’ll take them together, yeah?” she whispered back. Scarlett nodded, and held three fingers up in a countdown. Two. One.

Together, they charged into the room at the top of the tower, a circular space cluttered with desks, pipes and monstrous-looking equipment. In the centre towering above everything else was some sort of glass tube, glowing that deep red Mara had seen from below and bathing everything in a bloody light. Around it were four demon elves who turned to meet their attack with hisses and snarls.

Mara blocked the first blade swung at her with a gasp, kicking the vampire elf wielding it in the stomach as he used the locked blades as an opportunity to lunge for her throat. He staggered back, choking, as a second elf with entirely black, fish-like eyes rushed her. Almost without thinking, Mara jumped backwards with a beat of her wings, giving her enough space to deliver a kick under her attacker’s chin. He crumpled to the floor as Mara landed, unsteady but grinning. She was spared a moment to glance over at Scarlett, who was fending off both of her attackers at once with a brightly glowing glaive she had manifested from the talisman, a lot more elegantly than Mara had. It made her wonder just how much practice Jessica had had trying to get to this point in the story.

The first vampire elf scrambled to his feet and made another attempt to attack. Mara blocked a couple more blows, mentally thanking Paul for an algorithm that matched its difficulty to the user and wouldn’t let her completely suck at her first attempt at sword fighting. She swung forward, causing the pale figure to dodge, before finishing him off with a thrust to the chest. She wasn’t sure if that was sufficient to kill a vampire elf, but it certainly seemed enough to incapacitate him. From the other side of the room, Scarlett delivered a decisively cinematic kick to her final assailant. Mara gave her a thumbs up, which she returned, smiling despite herself.

The two of them approached the ominously glowing cylinder. It seemed to be filled with some sort of cloudy fluid, or possibly mist. As if the glow was emanating from something inside that they couldn’t see. “Reckon we can smash it?” Mara asked.

“I think so,” Scarlett replied. “I have the talisman, and you still have your wings.” A little bit of Jessica slipped back into her voice as she explained. “That’s where our magic comes from, in the story, you see, it’s why I need a talisman. I don’t know if you can—well, you can try to use it, see what happens.”

Mara closed her eyes and held out one hand, concentrating on the image of a magical glaive just like the one Scarlett held. When she cracked an eye open she saw it, hovering just an inch above her outstretched hand and bathing it in a pale blue glow.

“I have got to ask Paul how that works,” she said with glee as she snatched it out of the air and pointed it at the cylinder. “Ready?”

Scarlett nodded. “Let’s go.” They both braced and swung forward with their glaives, the magical energy slicing through the glass like butter. A web of cracks went up the cylinder before it shattered into pieces, red gas boiling out of it and revealing what lay in its centre—a lone pair of crimson wings, hovering by themselves and giving off a faint glow. Scarlett’s glaive fell to the ground as she dropped it in shock, and it returned to its small talisman shape, rolling off to one side. She barely noticed as she looked up at the wings in awe.

“They’re Scarlett’s—they’re _mine_ ,” she whispered, reaching up to touch them. As if they knew their owner, they swooped around of their own accord to knit to her back, long slits appearing in her clothing to accommodate them. She spun around and flexed her wings in delight, looking back over at Mara with a wide smile.

“Raven, we did it!”

“We did!” Mara replied warmly. She was about to suggest they try to wrap things up, but at that very moment a clamour of voices began to make themselves heard in the stairway below. Another group of their enemies had caught up, and it sounded like a mob. She and Scarlett exchanged a nervous glance, then Scarlett reached out her hand.

“I have an idea.” Hand in hand, they ran to one of the windows. Mara used the glaive she was still holding to smash it, before letting it dissolve away again. She leaned out of the window. The other side of the castle overlooked the city—this side, like the balcony beneath, looked directly out over the ravine. The drop faded into blackness. There was no sign of the ground.

“That’s a long way down,” Mara said, but she had no time to express how much of a good idea it would be to find a different way of escape before Scarlett tugged her up on the window ledge.

“Come on!” she cried, and flung herself and Mara out of the tower.

In a rush of panic, Mara spread out her wings, feeling cold air rush past her face and her stomach churn as they dropped. The wings caught the air and she stared at the far side of the ravine, willing herself to glide there and not just to fall like a stone. Paul’s warnings about not trying to fly rang in her head but she shoved them back, focussing on what she hoped flying might feel like. A little beneath her, Scarlett’s wings were flapping frantically.

“Can’t we fly properly in Reverie?” she yelled up at Mara, and Mara couldn’t decide whether she sounded frightened or just a little bit excited even in her current predicament. 

“It’s very hard to get the brain to forget about gravity,” Mara shouted back down at her, angling herself to swoop a bit lower and come alongside. “But focus on the feeling, on the other side of the ravine there, where we want to get to. Concentrate hard enough to drown out your fear of falling!” She felt grateful for the extent of experience she’d had with Reverie and breaking the rules of reality already. She honed in on the feeling of the wings above her cutting through the air and tugging her upwards against the pull of gravity. She remembered watching Paul float just off the tree stump in his woodland Reverie, face tense in concentration and a little bit of joy. Oh, he’d either be very pleased or very jealous to find out she’d successfully managed to fly—even if it was with the help of giant imaginary wings. The warmth of that thought buoyed her glide over to the far side of the chasm. The sight must have encouraged Scarlett as well, as her wingbeats steadied and became less frantic, following Mara down in a glide which terminated on a stretch of scrubby land at the top of the cliff. The landing was not in the slightest bit graceful, and the two of them hit the ground in a ruffled dusty heap. But they’d made it.

They caught their breath with their legs hanging over the side of the ravine, looking out to the castle on the other side, and the town surrounding it. The light from the tower gone, the pink glow was fading from the walls, and the main source of light came instead from the moon and from burning buildings, over which the dark shadows of dragons still circled.

“We sort of ruined your town,” said Mara, wincing a little as one of the dragons let forth another burst of flame. “Sorry about that.”

The girl beside her shrugged with a soft laugh that seemed more Jessica than Scarlett. “It’s okay. They’re the bad guys. And I guess I can just reset it if I want to go back.”

“Are you ready to go now?” Mara asked her softly.

Jessica kicked her heels against the rockface. “Susie’s out there, isn’t she? Is she mad at me?”

Mara shook her head. “I think she’s just worried about her friend, Jessica. When it comes down to it, you’re more important to her than the story is. But you know,” she said, gesturing back over at the beleaguered town, “this has been fun. I hope you two work it out and keep writing. I’d love to know what Scarlett and Raven get up to now Scarlett has her wings back.”

“I guess,” Jessica replied. “Okay. I’m ready. Let’s do it together?”

With a nod of affirmation, Mara held up three fingers. Two. One. They spoke together: “Exitus.”

\---

Paul leaned against the wall of the hospital room, watching the two girls hug each other and start to talk excitedly about what had happened, what it all looked like, and what it meant for their characters. He exchanged a glance with Mara beside him. She smiled up at him, still seeming to be thrilled over everything that had happened.

“When Reverie 2.0 comes out properly, I guess they’ll be able to play it through themselves,” she said, sounding a little wistful. “Their own version, playing their own characters. I wish I could see that.”

“Only when they’re old enough,” Paul added, earning himself a friendly punch on the arm. 

“The distraction worked well. The road was a good touch.” Mara’s eyebrows drew down into a thoughtful frown. “Does inserting big things into a Reverie always do… that?”

Paul chuckled, remembering some of the unsettling events of early Reverie development. “Only when it’s on the fly, which is why we don’t tend to do it, even during testing. The program tries to adjust the environment the best it can. But I figured the somewhat eldritch geometry would make it hard to miss.”

“Well you were right about that.” Mara leaned her head back against the wall. “There’s one other thing I don’t quite understand.”

“Go on.” He suspected what she was going to ask, and it still made him nervous. 

“Who was Prince Vikram? And why did he look…” Mara squinted, not quite able to figure it out.

“Familiar?” Paul finished for her. He gave a soft laugh and looked away. It wasn’t that he felt ashamed of it—not any more. But he wasn’t quite ready for that conversation. Not yet. “Maybe some other time.”

\--- 

A couple of days later, Paul tapped on the door to Mara’s office. “Got a moment? I’d like to show you something.” He waved his Reverie tablet at her. She folded down her laptop with an intrigued smile.

“Come in! We can use my place, since you’re here.”

It wasn’t quite designed for two people, but the two of them still managed to just about fit inside the cushioned inset in Mara’s office for using Reverie. They lay back, shoulder to shoulder. It felt a little like being best friends at a sleepover. Paul smiled to himself as he felt the comfortable and familiar tug into virtual reality. It seemed appropriate, somehow.

He took Mara through the library to a door he hadn’t show her yet. Her eyebrows raised as she realised.

“This is… Paul, are you sure?” she asked. Out of concern for his privacy, he knew, although her eyes also gleamed with excitement at seeing into another of his Reveries.

Paul ducked his head. “Yeah, I’m… to be honest, I still feel a little embarrassed. Not ashamed! It’s just… I’ve never shown this to anyone before. And I’d like to.”

He pushed open the door and invited Mara through, watching her face light up in awe at her surroundings. They were standing in a forest—not his green, leafy Reverie testbed, but an older, richer one, filled with giant trees with twisted, many-branched trunks the colour of cinnamon. Their broad leaves were golden, catching the sunlight and causing the whole forest to glow. There were wooden platforms and walkways in the trees, where brown-skinned elves in bright silk robes walked high above the ground, waving down at them. Others rode through air on the backs of dragons, swooping elegantly through the trees, red and orange streamers rippling in their wake. 

“Paul,” Mara breathed. “Oh Paul, it’s beautiful.” She looked over at him and her jaw dropped. “It _is_ you! I thought Prince Vikram was… I don’t know, my mind bringing something into the Reverie by itself, or something.” She blushed a little at the admission.

Paul looked down at the robes and long hair that had appeared on entering the Reverie. He’d been worried he’d feel silly but, strangely, he didn’t at all. It might help that he’d taken the opportunity to dress Mara in a similar fashion, in a long teal gown and her own set of elf ears peeking out of her hair. She looked down at herself in delight. 

“He’s not me, exactly,” he said. “But he sort of is.” That was an explanation that didn’t explain anything, so he started again.

“You already know about my father. While I was growing up I… developed a need to escape. I told you I read a lot, and that’s true, but I didn’t always feel like I could relate. So I wrote my own stories, where I could be an elf prince and be powerful and have adventures. This is him—I suppose he might have been a bit different while I wasn’t playing him though.”

Mara laughed. “Oh, he was very you.”

“I guess that’s self-insert characters for you,” he said, rolling his eyes. “When I left school I thought I grew out of making up my own worlds in the end. I went on to study science, got into oneirology—and now I’m here. I guess I did wind up creating new worlds after all. Didn’t work out so bad, did it?”

“So this,” Mara circled slowly, taking in the whole forest, “this is all based on what you wrote in school? And that elf army as well?”

“That’s right.” He put his hands in his pockets, not caring that it wasn’t a particularly princely move. “I think… I think I associated all this with that time in my life when I was anxious and scared. I never wanted to talk about it. But you know, from now on I think I’d rather associate it with Reverie. With you.”

To his surprise, he felt Mara fling her arms around his chest. “Oh Paul, thank you,” she said into his shoulder. “For showing me this. It means a lot.”

She began to pull away, maybe a little embarrassed at her outburst. He put an arm around her shoulder, keeping her next to him as she leant in to his side. “Thank _you_ ,” he replied, softly. “Thank you for being here.”

A flock of birds burst from the trees and his residual anxiety faded away. Something inside of him was coming back to life.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this silly little idea spiralled right out of control and all got a bit meta, didn't it? It certainly contains more allusions to My Immortal than I initially intended for a non-crack fic to be honest. Happy Yuletide, I hope you enjoyed yourself!


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